How do you defend the perspective of faith against the rationality of science?
I find it exceedingly difficult to defend faith against the rationality of science, because the rationality of science does not attack faith. Every attack on faith by “science” is an emotional reaction built on half-truths or hearsay.
Scientific reason proceeds from observing the physical world and deducing universal laws based on its consistent operation. A perfectly true scientific claim: “When I propel the baseball with X amount of force, the glove exerts an equal and opposite amount of force to cause it to stop.” This observation illustrates Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Scientific reason articulates the law governing the movement or nature of the physical world.
When people object to religion on the grounds of “science,” they are most often combining strong emotion with bad history in what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls a “subtraction story” — a simplistic cultural narrative lacking historical depth. In the case of enlightenment scientism: “As scientific understanding grows, we should leave behind comfort that comes from superstitious beliefs, like faith, and create a new world based upon the certain reasoning of science.”
This sentence does not make any scientific claim about the operation of the physical world. It expresses an aspiration of social engineering to excise religious faith as a legitimate cultural force. The adherent to enlightenment scientism may as well say, “My feeling of intellectual superiority and audacity in standing for science causes me to disparage other modes of intellectual inquiry as legitimate sources of knowledge, and I assert that society should run according to these emotions I personally associate with ‘science.’”
Others may claim: “There have been many studies that prove a man can become a woman, and faith does not acknowledge that.” This sentence likewise does not make any scientific claim, which must begin with physical observation and then deduce a universal law. Instead, it is an observation about our technological capability to alter the appearance and reproductive system of human beings. That is not science, but an act that does not heal, and often harms, under the guise of “medical care.”
Faith makes man more rational, not less. The facticity of scientific laws aligns perfectly with a God who created a cosmos predicated upon His own rational nature. In the first sentence of his Gospel, John the Evangelist describes the foundation of physical science: “the Logos (Reason) was God… and all things came to be through Him” (John 1:1,4). Every physical being in some way reflects the rationality of the Divine Nature, and that is why the scientific method works.
Father Charlie Archer is associate pastor of the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis.
